ISLAMABAD: Five policemen were killed and 22 others injured on Monday morning after a blast targeted a polio protection team in northwestern Pakistan, a police official confirmed.
The bomb blast targeted the vehicle in Mamund village in Pakistan's northwestern Bajaur district, police officer Aziz-ur-Rehman told Arab News. He said a police contingent was heading out to far-flung areas in the province to protect polio volunteers when one of the vehicles was targeted in a bomb blast.
“Five policemen were martyred and 22 others injured, with half of them in critical condition, when the vehicle they were travelling in was targeted by a remote-controlled bomb," Rehman said. He added that the village is located on the outskirts of Khar, a busy town in the tribal district.
Officials and local residents offer funeral prayers of police officers, who were killed in the roadside bombing, in Khar, Pakistan, on January 8, 2024. (AP)
Rehman said another police contingent was dispatched to the area after the blast, adding that all those who were critically injured were being shifted to Peshawar for treatment.
The outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group claimed responsibility for the blast. "A police mobile party was targeted with a mine blast in which six policemen were killed and 10 others severely wounded," Muhammad Khorasani, a TTP spokesperson, said in a statement.
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman and former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari condemned the blast, describing the police officers who were protecting the polio volunteers as "national heroes."
"Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police is frustrating the aims of terrorists," Bhutto-Zardari said in a statement. "The terrorists involved in the Bajaur incident and their facilitators are enemies of the nation."
The Bajur district near the Afghan border was once a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban — a close ally of Afghanistan’s Taliban government — before the Pakistani army drove the militants out of the tribal districts in successive operations that began in late 2000s.
In July last year, a suicide bomb blast killed over 50 people and wounded scores of others when the Jamiat Ulama-e-Islam Fazl (JUI-F) party held a convention for its supporters in the city.
Pakistan kicked off a nationwide door-to-door polio campaign to vaccinate children under the age of five years. The South Asian nation and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where the disease is still endemic.
Militants, including the Pakistani Taliban, have killed scores of polio vaccination workers and their security escorts in the past. Opposition to inoculation grew after the US Central Intelligence Agency organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda's former leader Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad in 2011.
